Haiti Unbound —— A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon

----- 海地释放:后殖民地规则螺旋向上的挑战

ISBN: 9781846314995 出版年：2010 页码：283 Glover, Kaiama L Liverpool University Press

How do natural forms influence abstract philosophical and poetic paradigms? In engineering and natural science environments, Haitian “spiralism” would be called a biomimetic movement: a paradigm that imitates the ingenious and complex designs of a construction found in nature. Kaiama Glover’s monograph Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon begins with a riveting description of the symbolic identity of the spiralist movement, from the double helix to the contours of the conch shell to the designs on the central pillar of the vodou ounfo or temple. What is at stake in spiralism is nothing less than navigating the painful aesthetics of cycles of misfortune. Spiralism in Haiti began in 1965 with the attempt of three individuals— Franketienne, Jean-Claude Fignole, and rene Philoctete—to imagine their world— or their “whirl”—within the terms of the spiral. Glover’s deeply poetic work opens a myriad of portals onto this largely ignored motif in the postcolonial Caribbean, while also navigating between the aesthetic register and the cultural and historical discourses and debates with which Haiti is most deeply associated through its revolutionary history. spiralism has many Glissantian echoes. Glover, trained in Lesser Antillean as well as Haitian literary history, rejects the impression that Haiti’s “admittedly extraordinary” past made it “incomparable or irreconcilable with its regional neighbors.” glover sees reflections and patterns, and is able to demarcate lines of contestation and mimesis, between Haiti and nearby islands that followed strikingly different destinies. Her work joins that of a select cohort including J. Michael dash and F. Nick Nesbitt in unifying literary criticism in these different arenas.